Share this story Seventy-four years ago today — 19 May 1952 — at Edwards Air Force Base in the high California desert, Grumman test pilot Corwin “Corky” Meyer climbed into the cockpit of an aircraft so strange that nobody else in the U.S. Navy...
Share this story Helicopters do something fixed-wing aircraft cannot. They land on rooftops, in jungles, on the back of a destroyer, on a forest road, on a Pacific atoll smaller than a basketball court. The price they pay is speed. A helicopter that cruises at 150...
Share this story On the morning of 18 June 1914 — ten years and six months after Orville Wright lifted off Kitty Hawk — a 21-year-old American named Lawrence Burst Sperry flew a Curtiss C-2 biplane down the Seine at 50 feet above the water in front of a crowd of...
Share this story Sun Country Airlines never expected to become an airline-industry case study. Founded in 1982 by laid-off Braniff pilots, it spent thirty years quietly running ski charters out of Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Las Vegas package tours, and the occasional...
Share this story Most African airlines have spent the last decade trying to survive. Ethiopian Airlines has spent the last decade trying to outgrow every other airline on its continent — and then a few off it. The Addis Ababa-based carrier flies more international...
Share this story When something goes catastrophically wrong in an aircraft cockpit, everything changes in an instant. Warning lights illuminate, horns blare, and the aircraft may suddenly behave in ways the pilots have never experienced outside a simulator. What...
Share this story Air traffic control is one of the most stressful jobs on Earth. Controllers are responsible for keeping thousands of aircraft from occupying the same piece of sky at the same time, all while managing delays, weather, emergencies, and pilots who...
Share this story Every flight that takes off anywhere in the world operates under one of two sets of rules: Visual Flight Rules (VFR) or Instrument Flight Rules (IFR). For passengers, this distinction is invisible. For pilots, it changes everything — from how they...
Share this story The question arrives in our inbox almost every day. Sometimes it comes with an apologetic preamble — “I know this sounds stupid, but…” — sometimes with barely concealed excitement, sometimes from someone who has been carrying the thought...
Share this story Every commercial airport runway is covered in white paint — stripes, numbers, rectangles, arrows, and chevrons that appear abstract from a passenger window but carry precise operational meaning for pilots. These markings are not decorative. Each one...
Share this story In an era when a laptop can simulate airflow over a wing in hours, you might assume the wind tunnel has become a museum piece. After all, Computational Fluid Dynamics — CFD — has transformed aerodynamic design, allowing engineers to model millions of...
Share this story At three o’clock on a September morning in 1956, the residents of St. Nicholas Avenue in Washington Heights were asleep — blissfully unaware that a single-engine Cessna was descending toward their street from the darkness above the Hudson River....
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